word

Microsoft has announced a Word plug-in to make it easier for visually impaired users to use its program. The plug-in will read Word 2003 and 2007 files out loud, and will also convert files from Open XML (the standard format used to save Word 2007 ... files) into DAISY, a format which is easier to use for producing digital audio files. DAISY (Digital Accessible Information Service) is a not-for-profit group based in Zurich, Switzerland. Formed by "talking books libraries," DAISY promotes open standards to make it easier to produce digital files. (Source: Guardian.co.uk ) Reed Shaffner, ... (view more)

You can put color behind your text in a word document: not just highlight it, but add color to the entire paragraph! It is fairly straightforward to do in Microsoft Word 2007. Follow the steps below to learn how: Launch MS Word 2007 if it is not ... already open. Key in the text to your document. In the Home tab on the Ribbon, in the Paragraph group, you will see a button that looks like can of paint. This is the Shading button. Click on the down arrow and on the resulting menu you will see a palette of colors that you can choose from to shade your paragraph. Select your color of your choosing. ... (view more)

There are a couple of ways to make formatting easier for you in Word 2007 and I am all about time saving and fewer key strokes! It isn't always easy to find everything on the Ribbon in Word 2007, but this should help you out. You could change case ... and clear formatting in older versions of MS Word and now I will tell you how to do it in the latest version! To change case in your document, follow the steps below: Open the Home tab. In the Font group, click the Change Case command. You can also use the shortcut Shift + F3 to do the same thing. The command Clear Formatting is very intuitive and ... (view more)

Sometimes you create wide documents that you will print in Landscape mode in MS Word and then it is very bothersome that you have to keep scrolling left and right within your document all the time. You can try to overcome this inconvenience by ... following the steps below: From the View menu, click on Zoom. Word displays the Zoom dialog box. Make sure that the Page Width button is selected. Click on OK. This action will cause Word to reduce or increase the magnification that is applied to your document so that the entire width of your document will fit on the screen at one time. Depending on the ... (view more)

Concerned about gaping holes in Microsoft Word, Outlook Express, or Internet Explorer? With a handful of updates recently made available, users of these programs can rest a bit easier. Microsoft has now made available six security updates for its ... products, filling holes in the above programs plus Kodak Image Viewer (which ships with Windows). The update itself fixes a total of nine bugs in MS software, four of which have been deemed critical. (Source: informationweek.com ) Perhaps the most frightening of the bugs is the one staring down college students as they ready for fall essays and exams ... (view more)

Sometimes when you are preparing a report you would like to add a chart to your document. The good news is that you can, and it is also very easy to do. Follow the steps below to create your chart in MS Word: On the Insert menu, click Object. Click ... the Create New tab. In the Object type box, click Microsoft Graph Chart. Click OK. To replace the sample data, follow these steps: Click a cell on the datasheet. Type the new text or numbers. If necessary, you can import data from a text file, a Lotus 1-2-3 file, or an MS Excel worksheet. You can also copy data from another program. To return to MS ... (view more)

Sometimes you want to be careful to use gender-neutral words in your documents. Word's grammar checker offers an option that will underline words that violate this gender neutrality with a green squiggly line, similar to what it does for sentence ... fragments, run-on sentences, and other grammar misfits. To ask Word to check for gender-specific terms such as 'policeman', follow the steps below: In Word 2002/2003: Choose Tools | Options from the main menu. Go to Spelling ... (view more)

I bet you didn't know that you can link documents together in MS Word. Well guess what? You can! Why bother linking documents together? You can hyperlink documents together so that the folks who read them can click on a hyperlink that will take them ... to a previous document that is referred to in the instant document. Say you've written to a colleague asking them to use information from a sales database to create a mail merge letter announcing a "Spring sale". You can create a hyperlink to a document instructing them how to create a merge letter. Word makes it super easy to link to ... (view more)

AutoComplete has been disabled in Word 2007 due to the enormous quantity of Building Blocks (the expanded successor to AutoText) that would otherwise cause AutoComplete to occur just about all the time. Now, what do I do? To force completion after ... typing the first four characters, you'll need to press the F3 key. This will work with any Building Block, not just AutoText. But, it will work only if there are no other entries that begin with the same four letters. Some users are finding it useful to use AutoCorrect entries instead of AutoText entries as a work-around, and to purposely create ... (view more)

Each time you save a Word 2007 file, it winds up in the My Documents folder. I will tell you how to change your default document folder for Word 2007 files. In Windows, all your Word documents save to the My Documents folder by default. However, you ... may require that you save your documents to a folder on a network server. Rather than navigating to the network server every time you need to save a file, you can change the default so your Word 2007 files automatically save to the correct folder. Follow the steps below: Click the Office button. Click the Word Options button. Click Save. Under ... (view more)